What is also being today is how Trump is taking the fight with Mueller to the court of public opinion. At some point, Clinton decided that rather than wait until Starr completed his investigation, he would step up and fight on his own terms. Lacking the benefit of Twitter, Clinton had surrogates repeatedly attack Starr as a partisan Republican operative obsessed with bringing down the president. Starr was accused of being fixated on sex and painted as a runaway inspector spending years and millions on a wasted effort. In the words of a White House official, the hostility was “part of our continuing strategy to destroy Ken Starr.”

Sound familiar? Trump’s initial legal team seemed content to remain under the radar and keep public comments to a minimum. All this changed with the hiring of Rudy Giuliani, who has relentlessly attacked the Russia investigation as a runaway train with no end in sight. Combine this with Trump’s constant tweets describing the probe as a “witch hunt” staffed with Democratic partisans and tainted by Mueller’s conflicts of interest. Trump has also criticized the length and cost of the investigation.

This is because Trump and his attorneys know that his fate will depend not on the legal intricacies of campaign finance laws or whether “collusion” constitutes a crime. This is a political battle that potentially leads to impeachment, and Trump is fighting not on the legal issues but over what it would take for Congress and his supporters to turn on him.

After years of investigating President Clinton the best Starr could come up with was that he lied about a personal relationship. To anyone paying attention, this did not come as a surprise. Allegations of marital infidelity had swirled around Clinton prior to his first presidential run, yet voters twice elected him because he was considered a successful leader. Democrats in Congress uniformly voted against ousting Clinton because they felt Starr uncovered nothing that warranted removal. The fact that Starr had been damaged from years of pummeling ensured the Democrats would have no repercussions for their votes.

Today, if Mueller’s findings simply reinforce what voters already knew about Trump, such as that he is fast and loose with the truth, has surrounded himself with questionable characters, and openly invited Russians to find and release Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, it likely will not be enough to turn public opinion against him. Trump’s team will thus continue to attack the prosecutors and attack the process in an effort to undermine whatever Mueller ultimately finds. The special counsel will be accused of bias, of mission creep, and of doing whatever it takes to reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the bar will keep getting raised as to what would justify removal of a president. Is it unseemly and highly inappropriate for a president to smear the prosecutors who have been duly tasked with investigating him? Sure. But it worked before with Bill Clinton, so it is not that crazy to imagine that it just might work again.